🎙️ Episode 44 – Rapallo: The Midnight Pact That Built Hitler's War Machine

Easter Sunday, 1922. One a.m. A telephone rings in an Italian hotel, and the German delegation gathers in their pajamas to make the most dangerous decision of the decade. Sixteen hours later, the two pariah nations of Europe — defeated Germany and Bolshevik Russia — sign a treaty that stuns the world. And buried inside that partnership is a secret that will shape the Second World War: hidden schools on Soviet soil where Germany trains the pilots and tank commanders that Versailles forbade it to have.

In Episode 44 of World War 2 in Focus, we take you inside the Genoa Conference, the midnight "pajama conference" at Rapallo, the assassination that followed, and the shadow army General Hans von Seeckt built in Russia — plus the journalist who exposed it all and was convicted of treason for telling the truth.

Inside this episode:

• The 1 a.m. phone call and the "pajama conference" that produced the Treaty of Rapallo
• The assassination of Walther Rathenau — gunned down two months after signing
• Lipetsk, Kama, and Tomka: the secret pilot, tank, and chemical-weapons schools hidden inside the Soviet Union
• Carl von Ossietzky, the whistleblower jailed for treason who won a Nobel Peace Prize he never collected
• The chilling 1939 handshake at Brest between a Kama graduate and Heinz Guderian — Rapallo's ghosts reunited on conquered Polish soil

Available now on Spotify and everywhere you listen to podcasts.

This episode covers the Treaty of Rapallo, the Genoa Conference of 1922, Walther Rathenau, Georgy Chicherin, Hans von Seeckt, the Reichswehr, secret German rearmament, the Lipetsk fighter-pilot school, the Kama tank school, German-Soviet military cooperation, the Weimar Republic, the Treaty of Versailles, and the hidden origins of the Luftwaffe and the panzer divisions of World War 2.

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